Uncivic sense

The other day i saw a man peeing in full public view. Men relieving themselves in the open — not only in the so-called ‘Millennium City’ of Gurgaon where i happen to live, but all over India — are a common sight not worth remarking upon. Except that this man was doing it right in front of a glitzy mall.

Had the man taken the trouble to walk just a few short yards, he would have had access to the mall’s clean, hygienic public toilets, at no cost to himself. Yet he chose to urinate in the open. Or maybe he didn’t choose to do so, but that it just came naturally to him: he wanted to relieve himself, so fine, he might as well do it there and then, right where he was.

I would have forgotten this commonplace incident if it were not for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s proposal to provide indoor lavatories in villages — specifically to ensure privacy and security for women, who risk sexual assault by going outdoors at night to answer nature’s call — and to create a hundred new cities.

The women of India, particularly of rural India, will owe the PM an immeasurable debt of gratitude if he can deliver on his promise. But this sentiment is perhaps unlikely to be shared by their male counterparts.

Indians in general, and Indian men, in particular, have arguably the lowest civic sense in the world. It is this lack of what could be called ‘mental infrastructure’, together with lack of physical infrastructure, that increasingly is turning our cities and towns into living nightmares of filth and squalor.

Indian cities are among the dirtiest and most polluted in the world. Even the ‘sacred city’ of Varanasi is not immune from this urban contagion, daily dumping tonnes of untreated human waste into the Ganga, turning the so-called ‘holy’ river into a sewage drain.

We can, and we certainly ought to, install lavatories in village homes. We can also project creating a hundred new cities, to accommodate the continuing migration from the rural hinterland to urban areas as the country’s workforce, slowly but inevitably, turns from agriculture to manufacturing. But these new cities will soon become as derelict and dysfunctional as all our other cities for lack of the mental infrastructure of basic civic sense.

Indians, notably Indian men, pee and crap where they will, even if toilet facilities are available to them. We routinely throw our garbage out of our homes onto the public streets with little or no regard as to who’s going to collect it, and what’s to be done about its disposal. We flout all traffic rules, resulting in a daily death toll of accidents and lethal outbursts of road rage.

We can plan to build cities, but it seems we ourselves are not planned, or mentally programmed, to live in them, and soon turn them into urban wastelands. And the tragic irony is that the Indian subcontinent boasted one of the earliest and best-designed cities in the world called Mohenjodaro.

Before thinking of building a hundred new cities, or even one new city, we should think of how we’re to reclaim our lost civic sense. How do we citizens of India become its true city-zens?

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

Author

A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, and Second Opinion, which appears on Wednesdays. He also writes the script for three cartoon strips. Two are in collaboration with Ajit Ninan, Like That Only which appears twice a week on Wednesday and Saturday and Power Point which appears on the Edit page of Times of India every Thursday. He also does a joint daily cartoon strip which appears online in collaboration with Partho Sengupta. His blog takes a contrarian view of topical and timeless issues, political, social, economic and speculative.

A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, a. . .

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Author

A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, and Second Opinion, which appears on Wednesdays. He also writes the script for three cartoon strips. Two are in collaboration with Ajit Ninan, Like That Only which appears twice a week on Wednesday and Saturday and Power Point which appears on the Edit page of Times of India every Thursday. He also does a joint daily cartoon strip which appears online in collaboration with Partho Sengupta. His blog takes a contrarian view of topical and timeless issues, political, social, economic and speculative.

A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, a. . .